Losing weight-- you're doing it wrong

[Turdacious]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtXW3S01IIo[/youtube]

[Pinky]

Sickening.

[Ronald RayGun]

I love how funny they find it! Knock knock...who's there?...I can't afford to feed myself!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! daaaaaaaam guurllll!

[Turdacious]

Legislation seemingly designed to protect the industry goes so far as to say that anyone who releases the amount of food stamp dollars paid to a store can be jailed.

Profiting from the poor’s taxpayer-funded purchases has become big business for a mix of major companies and corner bodegas, which have spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the USDA to keep the money flowing freely.

The National Association of Convenience Store Operators alone spends millions of dollars on lobbying yearly, including $1 million in the first quarter of this year. In February, 7-Eleven hired a former aide to House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, to lobby on “issues related to the general application and approval process for qualified establishments serving SNAP-eligible recipients.”

The USDA is notoriously secretive about who receives its money, relying on weak legal reasoning, said Steve Ellis of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

“USDA hides behind a specious proprietary data argument: The public doesn’t want to know internal business decisions or information about specific individuals’ finances,” he said. “The USDA sees retailers, junk food manufacturers and the big ag lobby as their customers, rather than the taxpayer.”

The agency also has no idea what type of food the benefits are buying

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... #pagebreak

[Pinky]

Conservatives who like to talk about abolishing cabinet departments wrongly focus on the Department of Education. The first Department on the chopping block should be the Department of Agriculture.

[Turdacious]

In related news, you can use your EBT cart to buy smokes, booze, and to gamble.

Jackie R. Whiton of Antrim had been a six-year employee at the Big Apple convenience store in Peterborough until a single transaction sent her job up in smoke.

The store clerk was fired after she refused to take a customer’s Electronic Balance Transfer card to pay for cigarettes. Whiton said a young man came in to the store to buy two packs or cigarettes on May 29. When she asked him for his ID, he handed her his EBT card.

EBT cards are used for both food and cash assistance programs. There are two types of cards: one can only be used for food. The other can be spent on anything and used just like a debit card.

Whiton said she did not think EBT cards could be used to purchase cigarettes and refused to sell to him. The two “had a little go-around” as the line got longer behind him, said Whiton.

“I made the statement, ‘do you think myself, that lady and that gentlemen should pay for your cigarettes?’ and he responded ‘yes,’ ” Whiton said.

The next day Whiton said the customer’s foster mother came to the store to complain. Whiton received a call later that day from the company’s home office in Maine, telling her it had received a complaint about her and reprimanded her.

“I said I would bow out gracefully and give my notice because I didn’t want to be a part of it. I’m 65 years old, you know?” Whiton said.

Charles E. Wilkins, the general manager of the C.N. Brown Co. that runs the stores, said the EBT cards in the cash phase could be used for any items, including alcohol, tobacco and gambling.

http://www.sentinelsource.com/news/loca ... 34771.html

[Turdacious]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqLrvwplCiY[/youtube]

[TerryB]

worrying about what poor people are buying with their food stamps is the epitome of arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic

it's an easy way to get your fill of righteous indignation for the day but it's a drop in the bucket

[milosz]

Would give more of a shit if food stamps/etc. weren't such a minuscule part of the overall budget situation (from federal on down).

[Blaidd Drwg]

y'all got called out by Proto!

for seriously. self respect yo. get some.

[The Crawdaddy]

Darwin. Still right after all these years.

[Turdacious]

worrying about what poor people are buying with their food stamps is the epitome of arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic

it's an easy way to get your fill of righteous indignation for the day but it's a drop in the bucket

For 2011, the USDA’s mandatory food stamp (SNAP) and other nutritional assistance programs will total $100 Billion dollars.

When discretionary food assistance programs are added, the number becomes $108 Billion, or 72% of the USDA’s annual budget authority. This number is up 30% since 2009, from $82 Billion.

http://www.bigpictureagriculture.com/20 ... grams.html

Big drop in the bucket, and a big drop in the state budget buckets too. When you consider how poorly our welfare programs are run, and how they incentivize and encourage long term and inter-generational poverty-- the problem is even bigger.

[Turdacious]

In 2013, rising employment and household income are projected to reduce the need for nutrition assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and lead to fewer program participants, even as SNAP serves a larger share of those eligible. While participation in the program has increased steadily since its last low point in FY 2000, and sharply in the economic downturn, the rate of increase has been declining since around January 2010.

http://www.obpa.usda.gov/budsum/FY13budsum.pdf

No wonder they have to cut ads.

[buckethead]

Big drop in the bucket

108B/3598B = 3%. They should also drop HBO

[buckethead]

Big drop in the bucket

108B/3598B = 3%. They should also drop HBO

In fact, if they were able to cut the interest rate on our debt in half, y'all could just let poor people enjoy their sucky lives.

Budgeted net interest on the public debt was approximately $251 billion in FY2011 (6% of spending).

[Thud]

In 1970, Sidney Willhelm's book "Who Needs the Negro?" (the latter word had currency at the time) argued that with the rise of automation within a capitalist economic system, African-American workers were transformed from being exploited to becoming "useless" from the viewpoint of those who controlled the economy and the automated productive processes emerging within it. Because of the racism of U.S. business interests, the workforce that automation would require could and would be largely white. Yes, business would continue to hire a number of blacks, but as much as the cloaked face of racism within companies would allow, black workers would become productively "unneeded." If black people disappeared tomorrow, Willhelm maintained, for capital they "would hardly be missed."

Willhelm's assessment is now truer than ever for both poor blacks and many whites who constitute part of the potential U.S. workforce within global capitalism. Were he to update his book, the title would likely be "Who Needs the Poor and Much of What Had Been Called the Middle-Class?" Since overseas labor is less costly, fewer U.S. workers are needed for the jobs that are and will be available in this country. Why spend money to provide U.S. poor children with adequate food, clothing, healthcare and other basics of life, along with the full funding needed to educate them? For business needs it would be a waste of money.

Of course some unskilled, low paid workers will continue to be required as part of the U.S. labor force, but the remainder won't. This leaves the "1%" with a problem: what to do as more and more U.S. poor become extraneous for production and profit? Certainly the 1% will not redistribute wealth on their own and provide the full means for educating poor children or for creating socially useful work that could employ the poor. However, neither can the 1% appear wholly indifferent. Thus their answer: fall back on the one path that has a long historical record of "success": blame the fate of the poor on their weak education. Then, under the guise that the poor matter to them, the oh-so-concerned rich concoct educational "reforms" purportedly aimed at preventing poor children from becoming poor adults. However, the reforms invariably ensure that poor children will become poor adults.

Hence, whether today's educational "reform" consists of relentless standardized testing, common core standards, stricter teacher evaluations, No Child Left Behind, "scientifically-based reading instruction," "no excuses" schools, intensive phonics, Race to the Top competition, etc., these and similar policy measures are paraded as solutions. In reality, however, they are illusions that require minimum allocation of resources and by the damage they inflict both to teaching and learning, these illusions prevent the introduction of genuine solutions. Each seemingly well-intentioned but failed "reform" adds another monument to the row of monuments symbolizing the best of intentions: "we try and try but poor children continue to fail educationally and then grow into poor adults who have no place or minimal place in the productive economic system and can't find work that provides adequate income."

Meanwhile, along the way, business interests have realized that while pretending to create educational answers for poor children, profit could be accumulated by destroying public schools, privatizing education, and creating another version of "corporate socialism," i.e., public money going into private hands. However, while it is important to combat this additional funneling of money upward, Willhelm's insight explains the chief engine driving one educational charade after another: the poor have little economic value to the rich. If most of today's more than 15 million poor children were suddenly to disappear, business leaders and the politicians who serve them would respond with initial expressions of pain and sadness, then quickly add: "but doesn't this mean we can now further reduce domestic spending?"

Without social activism that will confront and change the economic system that has generated one educational reform charade after another, continued generations of poor children will be doomed to wretched adulthood.



http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living ... ducat.html

[Turdacious]

Shockingly, the author of that article has a M.Ed.

[Pinky]

There is simply no justification for the continued existence of food stamps. They are an inefficient way to subsidize farmers disguised as an inefficient way to help the poor.

[Turdacious]

When the food stamp program began in the 1970s, it was designed to help about 1 of 50 Americans who were in severe financial distress. But thanks to eligibility changes first by President George W. Bush as part of the 2002 farm bill and then by President Obama in the 2008 stimulus, food stamps are becoming the latest middle-class entitlement.

A record 44.7 million people received food stamps in fiscal 2011, up from 28.2 million as recently as 2008. The cost has more than doubled in that same period, to $78 billion, and is on track to account for 78% of farm bill spending over the next decade. One in seven Americans now qualifies.

Once there was a stigma to going on the dole, and it was seen as a last resort. But now the Agriculture Department runs radio and TV ads prodding people to get the free food, as in a recent campaign that says food stamps will help you lose weight. A federal website boasts about strategies that have "increased program participation" with special emphasis on Hispanics because "our data show that many low-income Latinos simply don't apply for [food stamps] even though they're eligible."

In the 1990s Bill Clinton boasted that welfare reform took Americans off the dole. The Obama Administration boasts about how many it has added.

Enter Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, who proposed reforms to limit the worst excesses. One proposal would have established a federal asset test to ensure that food stamps aren't going to families that may not have an income but have tens of thousands of dollars in savings or may even live in a million-dollar home. Some 39 states have no real asset test for food stamps, which means wealthy families without anyone in the job market are eligible, and 27 have gross-income limits that are above 130% of the federal poverty guidelines.

That amendment lost 56-43, with every Democrat except Missouri's Claire McCaskill opposing it. New England Republicans Scott Brown, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and Nevada's Dean Heller joined the antireformers.

Mr. Sessions also tried to end the preposterous federal policy of paying some $500 million in bonuses to states that sign up more people for food stamps. This is the way government becomes a permanent feedback loop promoting even bigger government. That amendment lost 58-41, with every self-described Democratic "deficit hawk" opposed.

Still to come is an amendment on another egregious practice that lets some 15 states automatically enroll families for food stamps if they get federal home-heating subsidies. Some states mail heating subsidy checks of as little as $1 a month so families can qualify for federal food stamp benefits of as much as $130 a month. That amendment too is expected to fail.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... on_LEADTop